World
January 13, 2025 18:56
france - A 53-year-old woman from France left her husband for someone pretending to be Brad Pitt and was scammed for 830,000 euros. She hopes to raise awareness about the risks of this type of fraud.
A 53-year-old woman from France, a professional interior designer, left her husband for someone who claimed to be Brad Pitt and ended up being scammed for a staggering amount of 830,000 euros. She stated that 'He always had a reassuring answer ready for every doubt I expressed.'
When Anne, the interior designer, joined Instagram in early 2023 to post vacation photos, she received a message from someone claiming to be Jane Etta Pitt, who said she was actor Brad Pitt's mother. 'My son needs a woman like you,' she wrote. The next day, Anne was contacted by the Hollywood star himself, or so her interlocutor claimed. 'Hello Anne, my mother has told me a lot about you. I would like to get to know you better,' he wrote.
Anne, who was experiencing marital problems at the time, was initially skeptical of the man's identity but was swayed by the sweet words of 'Brad.'
After some time, the scammer started asking Anne for large sums of money. Following her divorce from her millionaire husband, she was asked by 'Brad' to pay customs fees for gifts from luxury brands. Despite paying 9,000 euros, the gifts never arrived. The man then asked for 775,000 euros from the French woman for medical treatments after 'being diagnosed with kidney cancer.' He claimed his accounts were frozen due to his divorce from Angelina Jolie.
To convince her, the scammer used fake documents and videos generated by artificial intelligence. In a little over a year, he swindled a total of around 830,000 euros from her. It was only when Anne saw the real Brad Pitt in photos with his real girlfriend, Inès de Ramon, that she began to realize that it was all a lie. In the summer of 2024, she decided to go to the police. Detectives are now trying to determine the identity of the perpetrator(s) as the victim was taken care of by a friend after being hospitalized for depression. She hopes to raise awareness about the risks of such scams and says, 'These people must be found.'
This is not the first fake Brad Pitt who has scammed women. In 2024, the Spanish police arrested five people who defrauded women as Brad Pitt. In 2022, a Spanish woman lost 170,000 euros to a fake Brad.